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And yet, a perfectly by-the-numbers game does not inherently promise a satisfying, enjoyable experience. Balance and numbers exist to serve the design and aesthetic of a game, not the other way around.

Everyone here is going to be able to cherrypick games that make good examples for own arguments here, so they don't mean much in and of themselves.

And yet, a perfectly by-the-numbers game does not inherently promise a satisfying, enjoyable experience. Balance and numbers exist to serve the design and aesthetic of a game, not the other way around.

Everyone here is going to be able to cherrypick games that make good examples for own arguments here, so they don't mean much in and of themselves.

Nobody is saying that. What people are saying is that in order to create a good game that has some reasonable longevity/relevance, you need some strong, fun/well integrated mechanics that leverage an array of player tools (units, weapons, powers/abilities). Ultimately those mechanics/tools need to deliver some sort of positive feedback for doing something fun in game to the player. Figuring out and leveraging tools in order to "win" and get feel good brain chemicals is how games work: it's about rewarding decision making.

You cannot do this by feel alone, especially not when all of the tools at the player's disposal are ultimately just numerical in nature. Decisions/outcomes are also not "feel based". They have concrete outcomes

To really deliver a great game you also need production value, but there are plenty of examples where this is not so: EVE onine, Dwarf Fort, etc, etc. You can also deliver a great game based exclusively on story, but that's a very different sort of game, basically an interactive narrative.

Sure, player feel can be exploited as a tool to get a certain behaviour: ie making weapons sounding cool. But if there is nothing to back it up eventually players will catch on. Also, almost all games are filled with absurdity that defies all sensible understanding, but still work great as mechanics: being able to revive someone who got hit in the face with a tank shell, spam building in Fornite, etc, etc, etc.

If the gameplay is good, people will suspend any sense of belief over just about anything: the entire RTS genre is basically fancy chess with tanks and space monsters and fantasy creatures with no bearing on anything "real". Like most games, they rely on proprietary but internally consistent rules. That's what most games are. It's only with FPS where you've got a bunch of nerds who demand things a certain way because "muh realism".

Also: providing concrete examples is not "cherry picking", it's called providing a fact based argument, as opposed to a platitude/truism filled argument.

I'm not sure how the "muh realism" tangent made it in there, but no, it's not an inherently flawed perspective or value. You're simply listing what you consider important to a game designed for your own enjoyment and values (values meaning what qualifies as skill, or what the "goal/purpose" of the game is.

I get where you're coming from, but it is ultimately just a certain perspective on game design intent, nothing objective.

I'm not sure how the "muh realism" tangent made it in there, but no, it's not an inherently flawed perspective or value. You're simply listing what you consider important to a game designed for your own enjoyment and values (values meaning what qualifies as skill, or what the "goal/purpose" of the game is.

I get where you're coming from, but it is ultimately just a certain perspective on game design intent, nothing objective.

You're just refusing to accept an objective reality.

SC/SC2 are two of the best games ever made, with enduring mass appeal and impact as a social phenomena because they are exceptionally well crafted mechanically and have phenomenal, objectively good balanced. They epitomize the concept of easy to learn, difficult to master. SC/SC2 are the chess games of the 21st century.

Chess and Go have enduring cultural appeal because they have a phenomenal set of mechanics and mathematical balance that leads itself to very deep emergent gameplay. The fact that you can teach a computer to win at these games, and in the case of Go you need a fabulously powerful computer in order to do so illustrates just how important mechanics/balance are to good game design.

Games that rely on PVP interactions live or die by how players interact with the game mechanics through the tools which they are provided. No more no less.

"Muh realism" is a flawed/perpective value for anything other than a sim. If you're making a sim and it's not realistically simulating SOME element of something, then it's a shit game. A sim doesn't have to simulate every aspect of a reality, it just needs to simulate some aspects well.

In a game like battlefield, demanding realism, especially when those demands aren't based on any actual grasp of reality (most gamers don't understand how humans move, or how guns are fired), is just a fools errand. DICE is pretty damn smart, they use realism to inform aesthetic, which is about as much reality as belongs in a non-sim.

especially when those demands aren't based on any actual grasp of reality

For this, I will again point to pop culture and memes.

Hollywood headshots and actual sniper doctrine is a good example. Following Hollywood has led to a poor weapon platform.

I play a lot of ARMA 3, I like that battlefield isn't ARMA in terms of hitting things and moving around.

There is just no good way to implement snipers in non-sims. Just like there isn't necessarily a good way to balance shotguns versus rifles in non-sims. That's why BF snipers and shotguns are the way they are. They are memey, but they work ok for game purposes.

False. You're refusing to accept that "objective" is not the appropriate term for your values and game concepts. Rational and logical? Absolutely. Objective? No. Those are not at all synonyms.

Quoted

DICE is pretty damn smart, they use realism to inform aesthetic

Indeed, and it works extraordinarily well. However, that's also the term I've been describing all along: "Aesthetic". Or "concept", or "design", or "rules", or any other term that describes the created concept of what a given game should, at its core, be about, emphasize, and value. And this aspect, which must exist for every game, is always subjective. It can be extremely rational and/or logical, but it's still ultimately a framework invented by humans, to serve design and gameplay values. And that makes it inherently subjective.

You can answer something like "Does gun X or Y have better hipfire accuracy" objectively, but you cannot answer "Why does gun X have better hipfire than gun Y?" objectively. The "why" is always subjective, because it's a servant of the created system. And because all systems are subjective, no concept, system, or style can ever be objectively superior to another.

As an extension of this, the philosophy/value-set that "A game should reward skill" is just as subjective as "A game should be fun", or "Players should want to win a match over anything else". None of these are inherently more valuable, objective, or "correct" than the others, nor any other declaration of intent/concept you could come up with.

False. You're refusing to accept that "objective" is not the appropriate term for your values and game concepts. Rational and logical? Absolutely. Objective? No. Those are not at all synonyms.

If you refuse to acknowledge that games like Chess, GO, SC1/SC2 are objectively good games by metrics that make up the valuation of a game, then there is basically no point in having a discussion because you value any statement equally on a whim of arbitrary value judgement.

I never said you had to LIKE those games. That's something different.

Quoted

Indeed, and it works extraordinarily well. However, that's also the term I've been describing all along: "Aesthetic". Or "concept", or "design", or "rules", or any other term that describes the created concept of what a given game should, at its core, be about, emphasize, and value. And this aspect, which must exist for every game, is always subjective. It can be extremely rational and/or logical, but it's still ultimately a framework invented by humans, to serve design and gameplay values. And that makes it inherently subjective.

You can answer something like "Does gun X or Y have better hipfire accuracy" objectively, but you cannot answer "Why does gun X have better hipfire than gun Y?" objectively. The "why" is always subjective, because it's a servant of the created system. And because all systems are subjective, no concept, system, or style can ever be objectively superior to another.

As an extension of this, the philosophy/value-set that "A game should reward skill" is just as subjective as "A game should be fun", or "Players should want to win a match over anything else". None of these are inherently more valuable, objective, or "correct" than the others, nor any other declaration of intent/concept you could come up with.

This is silly. You're the one conflating terms. Aesthetic is not design, is not concept, is not rules. There is certainly an aesthetic component to crafting games, but it goes far beyond that. For some games (typically short little experimental/art games) it is all aesthetics, but that's almost never the case for PVP games.

Of course the direction of a game is subjective. But there are objective metrics for evaluating the implementation of things in a game.

The "why do guns have hipfire" is not subjective. It's actually fairly obvious: it widens the toolspace that is guns and it forces players to make decisions on which tools to equip based on how and where they will be fighting.

"A game should be fun" is not a subjective goal. The almost exclusive goal of games is entertainment. Some games amount to educational tools or experiential art pieces, but that's re-purposing the medium to different ends. The objective reality is that games are built for entertainment. Again, if you think this is subjective you can't really participate in a discussion because to you up might as well be down.

All systems are NOT subjective. That's made up bullshit. That statement isn't even cogent to someone who is half a tray deep in pot brownies.

We are getting way too deep into this. The original statement simply holds true: A player will most likely not subject to game mechanics if they feel right and might find the need to delve deeper into these mechanics. Hence this site. If the mechanics however fail to deliver a good feeling, most players will try to analyze stuff by themselves and adjust from there. But if the inherent mechanics are somewhat inconsistent and deliver different results depending on small changes and are therefore too complex to dissect manually, people will eventually drop the game. The feel of the game is decisive, and that is congruent with the answers I got from the people that left the game. It does not feel right.

You can even see the effect on this site, when you compare it to BF3, 4 times. Of course the franchise is somewhat less potent as compared to 2013, yet the times where threads are opened daily and people were discussing more than spreadsheets are long gone. Basically, years back, this forum was full of people (youtubers included) with a slight interest in the mechanics and numbers, and that dropped after BF1 did not deliver a pleasant game experience. The people that are left is quite a small circle with an, I assume, academical background and a more than basic mathematical skill level.

And that is just the same story with the game itself. Here a clear design philosophy was replaced with an overdependence on algorithms, numbers and statistics.